My Garmin Replaced My Entire Wallet — Not Just the Bank Card
Garmin Pay handles paying, and Curve covers you if your bank isn't supported. But the rest of a wallet is loyalty cards — and those go on your wrist too, as barcodes you can scan straight off the screen.
I threw my wallet away, and it's not just Garmin Pay
I don't carry a wallet any more. Everything that used to be in it now lives on my watch. Garmin Pay is the obvious half of that story — the other half is the part almost nobody sets up.
Start with Garmin Pay
Contactless payment straight from the watch. Add your card in Garmin Connect, set a passcode, and you tap your wrist at the terminal. Once you're used to running or shopping without a wallet it's hard to go back.
If your bank isn't supported — and plenty aren't — you're not stuck. Services like Curve act as a wallet layer: you add your existing debit and credit cards to Curve, and Curve's own card is what you add to Garmin Pay. Your bank never needs to support Garmin directly. It's free, it works with most Visa and Mastercard cards, and it's the standard workaround for exactly this problem.
But a wallet isn't only bank cards
Mine was mostly loyalty cards. Supermarket, coffee shop, gym, bike shop, the pharmacy. That's the stuff that keeps a wallet in your pocket long after payments have moved to your wrist.
All of those are just barcodes. And a barcode is an image — so it can live on your watch.
How to do it
- Screenshot the barcode of each card, from the shop's app or the back of the physical card
- Install the Photos widget from the Connect IQ Store
- Upload the screenshots in the widget settings
Next time you're at the till, open the widget, press start for full screen, scroll to the right card, and hold your wrist out to be scanned.
Get Photos on Connect IQ →Making it work smoothly in a shop
Turn your brightness up first. This is the single biggest factor in whether a scanner reads your wrist first time. A dimmed screen, especially MIP in bright light, will fail.
Put the cards you use most at the front. Scrolling past eleven images while a queue builds behind you is not the frictionless future you were promised.
Be patient on the first sync. Images go over Bluetooth and it isn't quick. Load them the evening before, not on the way to the shop.
What still can't move
Be realistic: ID, driving licence and anything with a chip stay physical. This replaces the everyday clutter — the cards you use weekly and resent carrying — not your legal documents.
For me that was enough to stop carrying a wallet on any normal day. Keys, phone, watch, done.
The same trick is what I use for my parkrun barcode, which is where I first found it useful:
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